The Sixth Idea (12 page)

V
era Kushner looked up from her computer at the nurses' station when she heard the front doors of Meadowbrook Memory Care open. A handsome, well-dressed man approached her, a warm smile on his face. He was making direct eye contact with her, which she suddenly realized was so very unusual in this day and age, when most everybody was constantly fixated on their phones. Somehow, when she hadn't been looking, meaningless interaction with electronic devices had usurped meaningful interaction with real, live human beings. She was getting too old for this world.

Vera hesitated a moment before shifting into her “Welcome to Meadowbrook!” demeanor. This facility was small, and even though she hadn't worked here long, she knew all the family members who visited their loved ones regularly. She'd never seen this man before. “Good afternoon, sir, how can I help you?”

“I'm here to see my uncle. Arthur Friedman.”

“Oh, of course. Mr. Friedman is one of my favorite patients. Have you visited with us before?”

His smile faded. “Unfortunately, no. I didn't even know Uncle Art had Alzheimer's until last week.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “Family rift and all. You know how that goes.”

Vera knew exactly how things went. Meadowbrook was expensive, the residents wealthy, and it wasn't unusual for family vultures to suddenly show up in the end stages in the hopes they'd get written into a will at the last minute, which was so stupid. The people she cared for weren't legally competent to change their wills, and didn't they know that? And yet they kept coming for some scrap, some little handout that would never happen. It made her furious, but she kept her composure, because she wasn't here to judge.

“What is your name, sir, so I can check you into our system?”

“James Friedman. Jimmy. At least that's what Uncle Art always used to call me. I hope he'll remember me.”

Vera forced a sympathetic smile. “Your uncle has good days and bad days, but he is in an advanced stage of the disease. If you haven't seen him for a while, his condition might come as a shock.”

The man nodded solemnly. “Thank you for telling me that. Is he in good health?”

“We try to keep him as healthy and as comfortable as possible, but as mobility becomes more and more limited . . . well, it can be challenging.”

“Yes, of course. I see.” He tipped his head curiously. “Do I detect a hint of an accent?”

“You have a sharp ear, Mr. Friedman. I thought I'd completely lost my accent after all these years.”

“It's very faint. Where are you from originally?”

“Ukraine. Now, if you'll just follow me.”

Vera led him to Suite Six and stopped at the door. Mr. Friedman was in bed, just staring at a far wall. He didn't even acknowledge a presence in the room, which broke her heart. He was having a bad day. “Hello, Mr. Friedman. You have a visitor, isn't that exciting? It's your nephew, Jimmy.” She adjusted his pillows and blanket and wiped the spittle at the corners of his mouth.

Mr. Friedman just continued to stare right through her, as if she were a ghost. There were rare times when his eyes sparked with life and cognizance, but those moments didn't last. For the most part he was a dark silhouette of the person he'd once been, a person she would never know, but wished she could. “I'll get you a plate of cookies, Mr. Friedman. Oatmeal raisin today, your favorite.”

She excused herself and heard Jimmy say, “Hi, Uncle Art. It's Jimmy.”

When Vera returned with cookies and a glass of milk ten minutes later, Mr. Friedman was sleeping. His nephew was holding his hand, talking quietly to him.

“Is this normal for Uncle Art?” he whispered.

“I'm afraid it is, and I'm terribly sorry. Your uncle isn't often cognizant anymore.”

“Really?”

“As I mentioned before, he's in the very late stages of the disease.”

He sighed and shook her hand warmly. “Thank you for your compassion for Uncle Art. He's obviously in good hands.”

After Jimmy Friedman checked out and left, Vera logged off her
computer, then dug her cell out of her purse and made a call. It was answered on the first ring. “He had a visitor, Max. Mr. Friedman's nephew, but as we know, Mr. Friedman was an only child.”

“Sloppy, sloppy work. Did you recognize the idiot?”

“No, but I bluebugged his phone.”

“Did he question him?”

“He tried, but gave up quickly. Mr. Friedman's Alzheimer's saved him.”

Max snorted. “For what kind of life, the poor bastard?”

“How is our other friend?”

Vera heard Max sighing on the other end of the line. “Sadly, he passed away before we could speak. His heart, I think.”

T
here was no food or booze sitting out on Harley's foyer table when Gino and Magozzi arrived—a clear indication that it had been all work and no play at the mansion. Charlie was notably absent, too, as was Grace when they entered the third-floor office.

Harley was at his computer station, robotically dipping into a bag of Doritos with one hand while he worked his computer mouse with the other. He'd heard them coming, gave a backwards wave, but didn't break attention from his screen. “Hey, guys, pull up some chairs. Grace and Charlie are out for a walk but they should be back soon.”

Magozzi looked around the office, at the empty bags of chips and various other junk food containers in Harley's wastebasket; Grace's wastebasket was empty, save for an apple core and an empty bottle of orange juice. Some people ate through stress, other people starved through it.

Harley rubbed his hands together and finally spun around in his
chair. “Okay, we finally recovered Spencer's site. It was a bitch, but we did it.”

Magozzi rolled a chair next to Harley. “Who took it down?”

“Don't know yet, but it's somebody who almost knows what they're doing. Grace and I will figure it out. In the meantime . . .” Harley toggled up the home page of the site. “The background is the old black-and-white photo of eight men and President Eisenhower that Lydia Ascher told you about. The website is directed to the descendants of these men who worked on the hydrogen bomb. It's basically a trip down memory lane for a pretty exclusive group of people. Lots of historical factoids, family anecdotes—interesting stuff, but nothing earth-shattering.” Harley navigated to a different page where there was a diagram with names.

“Looks like a family tree,” Gino said.

“That's exactly what it is. On the left are the names of those eight men, and on all these branches shooting out from the main bracket are names of some of their descendants. Spencer was trying to fill in the tree.” Harley started pointing out names one by one. “Chuck Spencer, son. Wally Luntz, son . . .”

“Alvin Keller, are you kidding me?” Gino jabbed his finger at the name on the screen, earning a solemn look from Harley.

“Yeah, how about that? Your missing Alvin Keller—he was one of the original eight physicists. Not exactly the retired iron foundry worker he was playing in his retirement. And check this out, the dead guy in the snowbank in Cheeton, Ed Farrell—he was a grandson. If I were you, I'd do a welfare check on these other names, because it looks like somebody is trying to take out everybody on this family tree.”

Magozzi blinked at the screen and felt the muscles in his shoulders tighten. “Lydia Ascher isn't on the tree and she's a descendant.”

“Spencer's website was an outreach, and Lydia Ascher never signed onto it, never even knew about it until she met Spencer on the plane. There are probably a lot more descendants out there who don't have a clue Spencer's site existed.”

Gino folded his arms across his chest. “So there's some kind of a hit list on people who visited the site? And maybe all the descendants? That doesn't make any kind of sense.”

“Well, here's something interesting—Spencer's website was called the Sixth Idea—it's basically why he launched the site in the first place, as a general query about something he'd found in his father's old papers called the Sixth Idea. And he got a lot of responses from site users who'd found references to it in old documents
their
bomb-building parents or grandparents left for them after they'd kicked the bucket. It was like they were all on a treasure hunt, looking to solve an old mystery.”

Gino frowned. “So what's the mystery? What's the Sixth Idea?”

“Nobody knows, according to the chat room threads we've read so far. Alvin Keller, the one guy who would know, said it was a myth—Cold War scare tactics and saber-rattling. So we put the Beast on it, and there is no such thing as the Sixth Idea. But there
is
a Third Idea—it was the code name for the Soviet Union's development of thermonuclear weapons, aka the H-bomb.”

“Jesus,” Gino grumbled. “If the H-bomb was only the third idea, I don't even want to think about what the sixth idea is.”

Harley shrugged. “The hydrogen bomb was the ultimate Armageddon tool, and that's one of the reasons it got scrapped by the U.S.
and the Russians after the tests. I'm going with Alvin Keller—the concept of a Sixth Idea was just a myth, a Cold War scare tactic. Make your enemy think you've got something bigger and badder, and eventually you'll get yourself a nonproliferation treaty and a test ban.”

Magozzi shook his head. “Well, most of the people who were talking about it on Spencer's site ended up dead under very suspicious circumstances. And Keller's missing.”

“All I can tell you is the site is totally innocent, at least to the users. But maybe it's not so innocent to somebody else.”

I
t was noon by the time Lydia finally left her art room in the lower level of her house. On paper, the space was considered a basement, but in actuality it was anything but. The east wall was all glass, looking out over the lake, and in the morning the light was spectacular. It was her favorite spot in the whole house.

She had a stack of contract work to start on, but this morning her lazy hand had started sketching what it wanted to instead of what her many clients had ordered. The freestyle session had produced something very unexpected. She thought about taking it down from her easel and putting it in her portfolio labeled RANDOM SKETCHES, then decided to leave it up. She wasn't quite finished with it.

Lydia turned on her stool for one more look out at the frozen lake before going upstairs for lunch, smiling at the inch of snow that had decorated her little woods while she hadn't been looking.

She made a cup of tea, put some chicken soup on the stove to heat, then sat down at the kitchen table. Her grandfather's paperback was still sitting there, just where she'd left it. She picked it up and examined the cover again, then her brain stumbled, stopped, and rewound back in time.

“
What's this, Mom?”

Alice chuckled and sank cross-legged like a little girl on the hard wood floor of the attic. “Father—your grandfather—was a very organized man. He planned everything far in advance. He was only thirty-five years old when he died, but already he had this special box set aside for me.” She nudged the old dusty cardboard box toward Lydia as if the moment had great import. “This is it.”

Lydia lifted the top flaps and peeked inside. “What is all this?”

Alice shrugged. “His work files, old photos of people I don't know, notebooks full of math and equations I'll never understand. Apparently in our family, real intelligence skips a generation and, honey, you're the lucky winner. Maybe you'll be able to make sense of it—or maybe there's nothing to be made sense of. Maybe they're all just old mementos.”

Lydia frowned, then giggled as she pulled out a battered paperback with a buxom, half-dressed woman screaming and running from a fire. “One of these things is not like the others.”

“Father did love those torrid old pulp fiction paperbacks. I think it was his only escape from his work.” Alice's face went very still. “But there are some unusual things about this one.”

“Like what?”

“He gave it to me two days before he died and swore me to secrecy. It was mine and mine alone. I never told anybody, not my mother or brother or sister. When I got older, I realized how strange it was that he would give me such a book when I was only eight years old.”

Lydia frowned. “That is strange. It looks kind of . . . racy.”

“The cover was, at least for the time. But the subject matter was deadly serious and about as dark as it gets. This was no bodice ripper. But that's not the only puzzling thing about it. Notice, there's a title and the author's name on the front cover.”

“Yes . . .
In Case of Emergency
by Thea S. Dixid.”

“But there's no copyright page.”

“So what does that mean?”

“This wasn't published by an actual publishing company. And there's no record of this book ever existing. No author named Thea S. Dixid, no title
In Case of Emergency
ever copyrighted.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was a librarian for most of my life. I know how to look up books. I think Father wrote it himself and had it bound.”

“Really? Why do you think that?”

“Because it's filled with places I remember. There was a five-and-ten-cent store in the book—”

“A what?”

Alice chuckled. “You know, a dime store. Ben Franklin?”

Lydia shrugged helplessly.

“I loved that place. I can still see the front door and the little brass bell hanging from it to announce customers. And the
address painted in gold letters and numbers on the glass. Five-six-five Main Street. There was a tiny chip in the number six.”

“Good memories?”

“Wonderful memories. The store had a big plastic hand in the window with all the fingers spread out and every nail painted a different color. Exactly the way it was described in this book. There was a little soda fountain in there with a sign taped to the mirror behind the counter:
WE HAVE VANIL
LA LEMON PHOSPHATES
.” She looked at Lydia. “That was in the book, too. And that was where Father took me every Wednesday afternoon after school, back when we were still happy.”

“What made you all unhappy?”

“When Father started working for the government. Started working on the bomb.”

“Where was that?”

“Olean. Our last year there, before we started moving around.”

“Olean, New York, where Grandpa's buried?”

“Yes. Like I said, it was the last place we were happy. It was one of those little Americana towns that existed in such a narrow slice of time, where boys built their own soapbox cars with their dads for the annual derby down a big hill. All the veterans marched in the Fourth of July parade on Main Street and everyone in town came. I saw two Civil War vets march in that parade when I was little.” She smiled. “Father grew up near there. The family mausoleum was there and that's where he wanted to be. Had it in his will, Mother said. Everything arranged in advance.”

“I thought”—she hesitated for a moment—“that there were no remains after his plane crashed.”

“True. It was a memorial service primarily, but he has a nice plaque on a drawer in the family vault. I went to visit it once, years ago. Only once. Father is in my head, nowhere else . . .”

Lydia sparked back to the present when she heard her forgotten soup boiling angrily on the stove. She pulled it from the burner, left it to cool, then went back to the book and started reading from the beginning.

After an hour she'd come across all the passages her mother had mentioned, about the five-and-dime and the Fourth of July parade, and of course the section about building a generator. The rest of what she'd read was tedious, really. Her grandfather may have been a genius physicist, but he hadn't been a very good fiction writer. Why he would self-publish such a dark book and insist his daughter keep it a secret was a mystery she would probably never solve. If there was a hidden meaning somewhere in there, she couldn't see it.

She looked out the window and was alarmed to see almost white-out conditions. The morning weather had mentioned a system that would be moving through today, but this was looking serious. She decided to make the fifteen-mile drive to the grocery store and stock up in case the weather really meant business.

She picked up the phone and dialed Otis.

“Big storm coming, Lydie,” he answered.

“It looks that way. Listen, I'm going into town for some supplies. Do you need anything?”

“Thanks, but I'm all set.”

“Well, I'm cooking dinner—I'm thinking pork roast and applesauce—I hope you can make it.”

“If you're cooking, I'll be there, even if I have to walk through two feet of fresh snow.”

Lydia smiled. “I'll be back in a couple hours. See you then?”

“With bells on. Be careful on the roads.”

Otis hung up and set the receiver back into its cradle and stared out the window. The same white SUV he'd seen passing by on the road fifteen minutes ago was slowly heading past his driveway again in the opposite direction. It wasn't unusual to see vehicles he didn't recognize on this tiny little back road, but this one troubled him for some reason—it seemed like it was trolling, looking for something.

“Paranoid old fool,” he muttered to himself. His whole life, he'd never worried a single minute about himself, but ever since Lydia had moved in next door, he'd taken it upon himself to look out for her. A single city woman, living all alone out in the country, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe he'd go over to her place a little early, take a look at that cabinet and the leaky faucet she'd asked him to repair. Keep an eye on things.

He was halfway out the door when he turned back to grab his shotgun out of the front closet. You could never be too careful. Besides, his horses hadn't settled down one whit—probably the storm, but maybe not.